Life as an Extreme Sport

Category: …and everything else

Mostly everything else in a brain-academic way.

every streetlamp seems to beat a fatalistic warning

...and everything else, Academics, blog as therapy, life and living

It’s 11:13pm. Thursday evening. I have a pile of work to the left of me, a pile of reading to the right, a large monster masquerading as a cat draped across my feet, and a slightly smaller cat convinced he’s a monster rather insistently trying to lay across my shoulders as I type.

I am, for lack of better phrase, in a mood. The timing is, of course, brilliant – I always hit these when I’m alone. I mean, genuinely alone, no one really around that I could just poke and chitchat with. Might not be a coincidence, then, that it’s when this mood hits.

Not, of course, that it’s any sort of consistent mood. Rather, just a mood. And tonight’s is, in large part, thanks to the most recent Torchwood episode (Adam), which has thrown me where I am. Without spoiling it for folks who won’t see it until next week, it was one of the best examples of why I like the show – it reminded me strongly of Buffy mixed with Doctor Who, this wonderful blend of high camp and sublime acting, looking at the dark elements and how we live with our lives, our selves, our memories.

And so I am stuck with memory, which has already been a running dialogue with myself. What does it mean to remember, and to forget? To remember again? I suppose it started, thinking about concerts and ones I’ve seen for some online trivia thing. But it’s hard to contain thoughts about memory, perception, seeing the world. We shape memory, something I’m so highly conscious of – we warp and rewrite our own narrative, to suit the story we tell ourselves and those around us. Subtly make ourselves look better, right, more or less victimized. Whatever our narrative is, we adjust the memory accordingly. Some people find this startling or weird to think about, but memory studies suggest this to be the case.

What memories have I rewritten? Can I say with any certainty that what I remember is what happened? Or is it just what I wished happened? Wanted to happen? It is, of course, the Rashomon problem in a nutshell. Do we just hope to reach a consensus on shared experience, or does experience become shared when we share the same memory? Is this why we don’t talk? Is this why we hide what we’re saying, thinking, feeling behind gestures and obscurity and opaque masques? I know I’m guilty of it, of not wanting to reveal, of preferring to leave a small thread of my own narrative, one that can be picked up if you see it and ignored otherwise.

Tonight, I just feel like there has been a lot of thread – and a lot of ignoring.

body has given up and decided it’s time to sleep – before I make any brilliant errors here.

Edited to add: hah, how timely… within 30 minutes, to receive an email that just emphasizes the whole thing. Some people just have exquisite timing. Someone remind me why I do this again? I loved this once, didn’t I? Sometimes I think it’s just being kicked out of me…

geeks in space

...and everything else, Pop Culture, Stargate

From io9, the Seven Habits of Highly Effective Spaceship Captains. Click the link for full justification, but here’s a summary of the captain and the lesson:

1. The Prime Directive is just a suggestion.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Enterprise, Star Trek: The Next Generation)
Lesson learned? Rules are made to be broken.

2. Always shoot first.
Malcolm Reynolds (Captain, Serenity – Firefly)
Lesson learned? Show your crew that you’re willing to take a bullet for them, and they’ll do the same for you.

3. Don’t be afraid to hook up with a cute spaceman.
Leela (Futurama)
Lesson learned? A good leader has to get laid once in a while, and she shouldn’t be ashamed of it.

4. When you’re about to go genocidal, get a second opinion.
Admiral William Adama (Battlestar Galactica)
Lesson learned? True leaders do not ever make decisions alone.

5. Just because you have a crappy ship doesn’t mean you’re a loser.
Han Solo (Captain, Millennium Falcon – Star Wars; god help you if you don’t know that one)
Lesson learned? Every crappy PC is a lean, mean Linux box waiting to be born. Oh, and in case that didn’t make sense: It’s not the tools; it’s what you do with them.

6. Freedom fighters make good teammates
Captain Janeway (Star Trek: Voyager)
Lesson learned? A little subversion goes a long way.

7. There is always somebody out there who can bend spacetime better than you can.
Captain: AI Ship Sleeper Service (AI that captains itself)
Lesson learned? No matter how in control you are, always be ready for something for which you’re completely unprepared.

If I were doing the list, I would probably swap out Leela – I don’t watch Futurama – and replace her with Jack O’Neill (Stargate: SG-1). The lesson learned would probably be something about a good leader using humour for group cohesion/loyalty, or the value of using both brain and brawn. Or maybe just that there’s always time for a good Simpsons joke…

discomfort

...and everything else

So the autopsy results are back for Heath Ledger, and unsurprisingly, show he died of an accidental overdose of oxycodone, hydrocodone (vicodin), diazepam (Valium), temazepam, alprazolam and doxylamine (active ingredient in NyQuil). The Reuters article goes on to say that Ledger was likely either buying from a street corner or doctor shopping, because “medical experts said it was highly unlikely a single doctor would have prescribed such a mix.” (Their medical expert was Andrew Kolodny, a psychiatrist at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn.)

Oh really? I don’t doctor shop, in fact specifically because I’m very concerned about potential drug interactions with the variety of medications I take for the chronic pain, asthma, and occasional other issues. And I’ve been on oxycodone, Vicodin, Valium, and doxylamine at the same time, and with another sedative and a sleep aid thrown in for good measure (plus assorted other asthma medications).

And it’s a prescription combination kept up by several doctors over the course of several states (moves). So, obviously it’s not that unusual. But as I noted immediately after hearing of Ledger’s death, there is a quiet and continually running fear about my medications and when and how to take them for this very reason.